How the SCMP screwed up so badly flummoxed the most seasoned pundits (except me because I just know everything). But it certainly screwed up big time, like on the front page, like messing up with the president of the most powerful, most authoritarian country. Chinese President Hu Jintao was inadvertently turned into Hu Jia, a dissident turned jailbird for subverting state authority or whatever crime the Chinese government says he committed.
Meanwhile the same publication charges its online content, I guess, for journalistic excellency. If anything, I think the SCMP is morphing itself into The Onion, only less funny but it's a step in the right direction. Or just trying to be subversive like Hu Jia.
To prevent blunder like this happening again, I offer SCMP two words: Perry Lam. As far as I know Lam has been obsessive compulsive in his Chinese to English translation. I bet he can do English to Chinese just as good.
via duke of aberdeen's tweet and ESWN
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Hahahaha, I very recently added Perry Lam to my to-read blog list too. Your "obsessive compulsive" link to his old article is something I haven't read before and made me laugh out loud just at a casual glance! (I can't believe he needed to translate "less is more".)
ReplyDeleteHowever I must say he is not infallible either. The last article of his that you linked to, has the quote "the personal is politics", but hey, that is a misquote as it is actually a famous feminist slogan: "the personal is the political"!!! (If I remember correctly, Leung Man-To once made the same mistake, too.)
Also, I seriously object to his translation of "superlatives" as 「最高級詞語」! This Chinese phrase doesn't communicate the kind of connotation of excessiveness that the English word clearly has. I mean, it's not "the highest", it's "the most excessive"! (If you remember that old blog-post I wrote in which I slagged off someone from within my own university about his/her rhetorical excesses, by describing someone's teaching as "consistently superlative"!!!!! I still want to kill myself on remembering this cringeworthy phrase!)
(Okay sorry about my overkill of exclamation marks as linguistic excesses induce a near-physiological overreaction in me.)
Too bad I can't harass Perry Lam about his misquotation if not his actual mistranslation, as there's no comment function on his article.
(And of course I'm triple-checking this comment just in case my own typos and mistakes turn me into a similar target for ridicule... but serve me right if I do get caught out...)
I don't know the guy at all and I harbor no ill will toward him, it's just for fun though at his expense, haw haw. I just find his translation like I say obsessive and compulsive and for the most part really unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think whenever I try to be a grammar police I invariably make the same mistakes myself so ... it's hard to be a goody good good grammar police.
Hmm, yes, I just made one myself now I realise. Looks like the more accurate feminist slogan is "The personal is political" (i.e. without "the" in front of "political"). In my defense however, versions of this slogan that included the "the" are also widely used, as in here:
ReplyDeleteIn the last couple of decades, one of the most popular political slogans on the left, especially among feminists, has been: “The personal is the political.” For feminists the phrase is invoked to point out that the personal choices women make — for example, whether to continue working full-time after having children — cannot be extracted from the larger political context in which they take place.